


Meta‘s Oversight Board overturned Facebook‘s removal of a post critical of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) on Wednesday.
According to the board, the platform was wrong to remove an August 2024 post that superimposed the faces of Harris and Walz onto a 1994 movie poster for Dumb and Dumber, on which the characters are seen pinching each other’s nipples. While Facebook said the post violated its bullying and harassment standard because it included “derogatory sexualized photoshop or drawings,” the user appealed to the board, and Facebook reinstated the post.
“In this case, however, the Board highlights the overenforcement of Meta’s Bullying and Harassment policy with respect to satire and political speech in the form of a non-sexualized derogatory depiction of political figures,” the board wrote. “It also points to the dangers that overenforcing the Bullying and Harassment policy can have, especially in the context of an election, as it may lead to the excessive removal of political speech and undermine the ability to criticize government officials and political candidates, including in a sarcastic manner.”
As the image appears on other social media platforms, the board referred to the edited photo as “nothing more than a commonplace satirical image of prominent politicians and is instantly recognizable as such.”
This comes two months after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “Senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.” The CEO did not endorse either candidate ahead of Election Day, in addition to not contributing financially to either campaign.
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Meta has not published its process for assessing satirical content on Facebook. Earlier this year, the platform developed the habit of removing all manipulated media but changed its procedure to label such posts with the caption “made with AI” instead.
Facebook began labeling videos with the artificial intelligence marker after an altered video of President Joe Biden went viral at the beginning of this year. A video of Biden placing an “I Voted” sticker on his granddaughter was manipulated to appear as if he was fondling her chest. The platform left the post active with a new caption to clarify it was “made with AI.”